"Do you believe in fate?"

"Let me tell you..."

Kate Bowler wrote this fabulous book called Everything Happens for a Reason after her cancer diagnosis. She is a theologian and, as such, certainly within the religious community, she would hear this platitude often.

She was young when diagnosed with a small child. The prognosis was not great as her cancer had metastasized.

But—as you may have guessed—she often heard the crap, “Everything happens for a reason” from a lot of religious zealots.

I thought about her today when some dude I was talking to online asked me if I believed in fate. I already wasn’t impressed, thinking this some sort of lame pick up lame.

I said no and when he pressed me as to why, I gave him the truth.

I gave him the PG version from the R version that was circling in my mind:

PG Version: Because two of my immediate family members completed suicide, I don’t believe in a reduced fate of everything is supposed to happen as it does. I don’t believe that was supposed to happen.

(An aside—and seriously, if I did—wouldn’t that be rather fucked up?)

R rated version: My dad and brother blew their brains out; so, believing in fairy tales of fate is not a luxury that I have. I don’t believe that that shit was in the cards and was meant to happen.

Look, I know this may sound overly harsh, critical and sarcastic.

Truly, I get it that many people find that premise very comforting. Because it’s rooted in this believe that someone is looking out for us and that all paths lead to good, ultimately.

I get that. Whatever works for you to make sense of this universe and the crap that happens, great. If that works for you, good. If it helps you—awesome.

But please don’t apply that logic to universal existence and for everyone’s life story, that all the horrific grief and tragedies that many people have experienced was somehow fate or their fate.

(Unless, of course, you’re just cherry picking examples of fate. Only the good stuff was meant to be.)

Life is hard. There’s a lot of shit that happens.

To me, for me, fate is a fairy tale. If your life is one that you believe the fairy tale, I would also say this: maybe you’re privileged to be able to do so.

Now, that being said, and as I’ve written about before, I think there can be wonderful blessings and growth and God’s intervention to make good from a colossal shitshow. That’s different.

I have to embrace that belief.

But when people spew this thing that preordained notion that it was all supposed to happen, like this, just as, I often bite my tongue.

I have to believe that spinning shit into gold notion (Doyle) because, otherwise, I would have given up a long time ago.

That part was key to my survival, making it through two suicides in my immediate family, my mother’s passive suicide and my own baby losses and mental health condition.

We can take enormous lessons and have amazing growth from clusterfucks and immensely fucked up situations.

That—I do believe.